The Golden Elephant

Blue eyes stared at her in shocked incomprehension. Blood sprayed from his left carotid artery, severed by the stroke, which had slashed though his collarbone and into his chest. He mouthed a soundless word. Then he fell to his right.

His right hand, clutching a black 9 mm Beretta pistol, fell to the street. The Beretta clacked on the stones but didn’t discharge.

The man Annja had thrown was quiet, his lifeblood spreading in a pool beneath him. He didn’t even acknowledge her as she walked up to stand over him.

She made the sword go away. Walking quickly down the hill, she turned into the first alley to her right, and was gone from that place.

8

Harsh half-muted voices drew Annja’s attention to a tableau in the street below. Leaning over a concrete balustrade once white, now grayed and specked with city grime, she could hear no words. She made out three voices, two masculine and low, and one feminine. The woman’s voice was young, contralto. Just from its pitch and flow it was clearly as educated as the men’s speech was rough.

It was also very familiar. Easy Ngwenya! Annja thought.

Her heart sprang into her throat. She crouched to reduce her visibility from below. The three didn’t seem to have noticed her. That was good. She left the sword where it was. It was going to be hard enough explaining hunkering down here peering over the railing like a little girl playing hide-and-seek to any random passerby without trying to account for a large and deadly weapon.

Easy stood with feet apart just more than shoulder width, toes of designer Italian shoes pointed slightly outward. She wore a long black leather coat that looked expensive.

Easy’s hands were on her hips, under the tails of the long coat, hiking them up. The two men, who were dressed in a manner surprisingly reminiscent of Annja’s three recent acquaintances showed no sign of awareness of what she was about.

The woman’s voice rose, becoming sharp and peremptory. Annja made out an unmistakable “Non!”

The men’s hands moved fast and decisively.

Annja was too far away to do anything about what she knew was about to happen. She didn’t know whose side she’d intervene on anyway.

The man on Easy’s left shouted. His partner lunged suddenly for her from what he seemed to think was her blind spot. Metal glinted in his hand in the light of a streetlamp a block away.

Easy’s right hand came out. A gun fired. The man staggered and sagged as a bullet, apparently not even aimed, slammed into his midsection.

The other man tried to move. He dropped his knife and reached back in his peacoat. Easy’s left hand snapped up to shoulder height at her arm’s full extension. The muzzle-flash lit a feral, stubbled face.

Annja winced as a dark cloud puffed out behind the head. The man collapsed. Easy now turned her head toward the man on her right, who was still on his feet and waving what Annja took for a knife. Easy straightened her right arm, sighted quickly. Her Sphinx spoke again. The man pitched onto his face. The knife bounced on the sidewalk. His hands scrabbled at the pavement, spasmed once, went still.

Easy was walking away, briskly but not hastily, tucking her matched weapons back into their holsters.

Annja let out a long breath she hadn’t realized she was keeping in. She hurried down the steps.

The confrontation had taken place at a broadening of an otherwise narrow street. A retaining wall kept bits of Montmartre from falling on passersby on one side, and on the other were two-and three-story buildings, their lower floors armored by accordion-style steel shutters. Hurrying toward the scene of a recent, and loud, double homicide—especially when spattered with blood not her own—wasn’t the smartest thing to do, Annja knew. But there was something she had to know. If spotted, she could always claim she was trying to aid the victims.

No lights showed on any of the upper floors on the two nearby blocks, although Annja guessed some held residences and some were almost certainly currently inhabited, allures of Parisian nightlife notwithstanding. But this was also not the choicest neighborhood in the city. Residents might be somewhat accustomed to the sound of nearby gunfire. They were a lot more likely to lie on the floor for a spell than peer out and make possible targets of themselves.

Much less call the police.

Annja rushed to the nearest man. Easy had shot him in the face. He lay sprawled on his back with arms outflung.

She toed gingerly at the front of his peacoat. It slid aside enough to reveal a glimpse of dark metal and checked rubber. He carried a pistol in a shoulder rig.

It was all she needed to know. Sirens commenced their song, in the middle distance and getting louder fast. She picked a different direction from the one Easy had taken and walked away fast without appearing to hurry.

It was fast enough. No one stopped her.

T HE CENTER OF P ARIS itself is tiny, and can be walked around in a day, despite the vast and expanding dreary suburbs surrounding it. Walking to her hotel at a more leisurely pace, Annja breathed deeply into her abdomen in a basic meditation technique to soothe her heart rate and metabolism back to normal and bring her thoughts under control.

She lacked the luxury of blanking her mind for any protracted stretch, though. Nor was she sure she wanted to. She had just killed three men. No matter how justified that was, she had vowed she would never take that lightly. She had also seen two more men killed with ruthless efficiency.

Key to her mind was that she had bumped into notorious pot hunter and media personality Easy Ngwenya three times in her life in person. And twice had come in the past thirty-six hours. In that latter span six people had died in close proximity to the two of them. One, Sir Sidney, had been unquestionably and brutally murdered. The others appeared to have been making good-faith efforts to kill, in one case Annja, in the other Ngwenya.

What’s going on?

One thing she felt confident dismissing out of hand—those had not been standard street muggings. Annja’s had been a hired assassination from the get-go. But Easy’s?

The fibers of Annja’s being seemed to glow like lamp filaments with the desire to blame all this on the errant heiress. Could what Annja had witnessed at ground level below Montmartre have been a falling out among thieves or murderers?

Walking through the lights and the chattering camera-flashing throngs of the Champs-Elysées as the traffic hissed and beeped beside her in an endless stream, Annja had little doubt all five would-be assassins had been cut from the same cloth—hard men but not street-criminal hard. Pro hard. Dressed cheaply but in newish clothes. Flashing knives but carrying guns. Firearms weren’t rare in European crime, and were becoming less rare all the time as social order unraveled. But they were still fairly pricy items for Parisian street toughs.

No. These were hired killers. Something in the way her own attackers moved suggested to Annja they had been ex-military. Such men didn’t do such work for cheap.

Well, Easy’s rich, isn’t she? Annja thought.

It all came back to the Golden Elephant. Was it possible they were after the same thing? When Annja had barely learned of the thing’s existence—had yet to verify it really did exist?

“Put it this way,” she said out loud, attracting curious glances from a set of Japanese tourists. “Is it possible we’re not?”

She didn’t see how. What else could explain all the coincidences, not to mention the sudden attacks?

Wait, a dissenting part of her mind insisted. There’re plenty of reasons for Easy to be here. She was a jetsetter, a noted cosmopolitan, although the paparazzi were known to give her wary distance—possibly because of those twin Sphinxes. She had gone to school at Oxford and the Sorbonne, as well as Harvard.

“Right,” Annja said. “So she just happens to visit two of her almas mater just as I happen to be in the same towns and a bunch of people end up dead. Sorry.” The last was addressed to a young couple with a pair of small kids clinging to their legs, staring at her in mingled horror and fascination.

“I’m a thriller writer,” she said, waving a hand at them. “Plotting out loud. Don’t mind me.” She showed them a smile that probably looked as ghastly to them as it felt to her and walked on up the street, trying to figure out what a distracted novelist would walk like.

Now you’re scaring the tourists, she told herself in annoyance. If anything’s going to bring down the heat on you it’s that.

She sighed. I’m really trying not to leap to conclusions based on prejudice here, she thought. Prejudice as to her rival’s primary occupation—Ngwenya’s nationality and skin color meant nothing to Annja.

But I keep coming back to the strong suspicion Easy Ngwenya’s a conscienceless little multiple murderess.

I N HER HOTEL ROOM , a modest three-star establishment not far from the Tuileries with only moderately ruinous rates, Annja sat back and ran her hands across her face and back through her heavy chestnut hair, which hung over the shoulders of her black Chasing History’s Monsters crew T-shirt. Her notebook computer lay open before her crossed legs, propped on a pillow so the cooling-fan exhaust wouldn’t scorch her bare thighs.

She had been doing research not on the Golden Elephant—a quick check of her e-mail accounts showed no helpful responses to a number of guarded queries she’d fired off to contacts across the world—but on the Elephant Calf. Princess Easy herself.

She was a concert pianist, world-class gymnast, martial artist, model, scholar. Pot hunter. There was a quote from an interview with the German magazine Spiegel that jumped out at Annja: “To be sure I’m rich and multitalented. But that has nothing to do with me. Those are circumstances. I prefer to focus on my achievements.”

She rocked back on the bed, frowning. She badly wanted to toss that off as spoiled-little-rich-girl arrogance. Arrogant it was. But at base it made sense.

And Elephant Calf Ngwenya had achievements.

She had even been a celebrity as a little girl. National Geographic had done a spread on the official celebration of the birth of a royal first child of one of Africa’s most powerful tribes, and again on the party her father had thrown for her fifth birthday. At the latter Easy foreshadowed things to come, wowing the crowd playing Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” on a concert grand piano, then ruining her pink party dress and shoes in a fistfight with the eight-year-old son of the ambassador from Mali. She won.